PENZHINA--POSTS FOR ELEVATED ROAD--FIFTY-THREE BELOW ZERO--TALKED
OUT--ASTRONOMICAL LECTURES--EATING PLANETS--THE HOUSE OF A PRIEST
The village of Penzhina is a little collection of log houses,
flat-topped _yurts_, and four-legged _balagáns,_ situated on the north
bank of the river which bears its name, about half-way between the
Okhotsk Sea and Anadyrsk. It is inhabited principally by _meshcháns_
(mesh-chans'), or free Russian peasants, but contains also in its
scanty population a few "Chuances" or aboriginal Siberian natives, who
were subjugated by the Russian Cossacks in the eighteenth century,
and who now speak the language of their conquerors and gain a scanty
subsistence by fishing and trading in furs. The town is sheltered on
the north by a very steep bluff about a hundred feet in height, which,
like all hills in the vicinity of Russian settlements, bears upon
its summit a Greek cross with three arms. The river opposite the
settlement is about a hundred yards in width, and its banks are
heavily timbered with birch, larch, poplar, willow, and aspen. Owing
to warm springs in its bed, it never entirely freezes over at this
point, and in a temperature of 40° below zero gives off dense clouds
of steam which hide the village from sight as effectually as a London
fog.
We remained at Penzhina three days, gathering information about the
surrounding country and engaging men to cut poles for our line. We
found the people to be cheerful, good-natured, and hospitable, and
disposed to do all in their power to further our plans; but of course
they had never heard of a telegraph, and could not imagine what we
were going to do with the poles which we were so anxious to have cut.
Some said that we intended to build a wooden road from Gizhiga to
Anadyrsk, so that it would be possible to travel back and forth in the
summer; others contended with some show of probability that two men,
even if they _were_ Americans, could not construct a wooden road, six
hundred versts long, and that our real object was to build some
sort of a huge house. When questioned as to the use of this immense
edifice, however, the advocates of the house theory were covered with
confusion, and could only insist upon the physical impossibility of
a road, and call upon their opponents to accept the house or suggest
something better. We succeeded in engaging sixteen able-bodied men,
however, to cut poles for a reasonable compensation, gave them the
required dimensions--twenty-one feet long and five inches in diameter
at the top--and instructed them to cut as many as possible, and pile
them up along the banks of the river.
I may as well mention here, that when I returned from Anadyrsk in
March I went to look at the poles, 500 in number, which the Penzhina
men had cut. I found, to my great astonishment, that there was hardly
one of them less than twelve inches in diameter at the top, and that
the majority were so heavy and unwieldy that a dozen men could not
move them. I told the natives that they would not do, and asked why
they had not cut smaller ones, as I had directed. They replied that
they supposed I wanted to build some kind of a road on the tops of
these poles, and they knew that poles only five inches in diameter
would not be strong enough to hold it up! They had accordingly cut
trees large enough to be used as pillars for a state-house. They still
lie there, buried in arctic snows; and I have no doubt that many years
hence, when Macaulay's New Zealander shall have finished sketching the
ruins of St. Paul's and shall have gone to Siberia to complete his
education, he will be entertained by his native drivers with stories
of how two crazy Americans once tried to build an elevated railroad
from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait. I only hope that the New
Zealander will write a book, and confer upon the two crazy Americans
the honour and the immortality which their labours deserved, but which
the elevated railroad failed to give.
We left Penzhina on the 31st day of December for Anadyrsk. After
travelling all day, as usual, over a barren steppe, we camped for
the night near the foot of a white isolated peak called Nalgim, in a
temperature of 53° below zero. It was New Year's Eve; and as I sat by
the fire in my heaviest furs, covered from head to foot with frost,
I thought of the great change which a single year had made in my
surroundings. New Year's Eve, 1864, I had spent in Central America,
riding on a mule from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific coast, through a
magnificent tropical forest. New Year's Eve, 1865, found me squatting
on a great snowy plain near the Arctic Circle, trying, in a
temperature of 53° below zero, to eat up my soup before it froze
solidly to the plate. Hardly could there have been a greater contrast.
Our camp near Mount Nalgim abounded in trailing-pine and we made a
fire which sent up a column of ruddy flame ten feet in height; but it
did not seem to have much influence upon the atmosphere. Our eyelids
froze together while we were drinking tea; our soup, taken hot from
the kettle, froze in our tin plates before we could possibly finish
eating it; and the breasts of our fur coats were covered with a white
rime, while we sat only a few feet from a huge blazing camp-fire. Tin
plates, knives, and spoons burned the bare hand when touched, almost
exactly as if they were red-hot; and water, spilled on a little piece
of board only fourteen inches from the fire, froze solid in less than
two minutes. The warm bodies of our dogs gave off clouds of steam; and
even the bare hand, wiped perfectly dry, exhaled a thin vapour
when exposed to the air. We had never before experienced so low a
temperature; but we suffered very little except from cold feet, and
Dodd declared that with a good fire and plenty of fat food he would
not be afraid to try fifteen degrees lower. The greatest cause of
suffering in Siberia is wind. Twenty degrees below zero, with a fresh
breeze, is very trying; and a gale of wind, with a temperature
of -40°, is almost unendurable. Intense cold of itself is not
particularly dangerous to life. A man who will eat a hearty supper of
dried fish and tallow, dress himself in a Siberian costume, and crawl
into a heavy fur bag, may spend a night out-doors in a temperature of
-70° without any serious danger; but if he is tired out, with long
travel, if his clothes are wet with perspiration, or if he has not
enough to eat, he may freeze to death with the thermometer at zero.
The most important rules for an arctic traveller are: to eat plenty of
fat food; to avoid over-exertion and night journeys; and never to
get into a profuse perspiration by violent exercise for the sake of
temporary warmth. I have seen Wandering Chukchis in a region destitute
of wood and in a dangerous temperature, travel all day with aching
feet rather than exhaust their strength by trying to warm them in
running. They would never exercise except when it was absolutely
necessary to keep from freezing. As a natural consequence, they were
almost as fresh at night as they had been in the morning, and if they
failed to find wood for a fire, or were compelled by some unforeseen
exigency to travel throughout the twenty-four hours, they had
the strength to do it. An inexperienced traveller under the same
circumstances, would have exhausted all his energy during the day in
trying to keep perfectly warm; and at night, wet with perspiration and
tired out by too much violent exercise, he would almost inevitably
have frozen to death.
For two hours after supper, Dodd and I sat by the fire, trying
experiments to see what the intense cold would do. About eight o'clock
the heavens became suddenly overcast with clouds, and in less than an
hour the thermometer had risen nearly thirty degrees. Congratulating
ourselves upon this fortunate change in the weather, we crawled into
our fur bags and slept away as much as we could of the long arctic
night.
Our life for the next few days was the same monotonous routine of
riding, camping, and sleeping with which we were already so familiar.
The country over which we passed was generally bleak, desolate, and
uninteresting; the weather was cold enough for discomfort, but not
enough so to make outdoor life dangerous or exciting; the days were
only two or three hours in length and the nights were interminable.
Going into camp early in the afternoon, when the sun disappeared, we
had before us about twenty hours of darkness, in which we must either
amuse ourselves in some way, or sleep. Twenty hours' sleep for any one
but a Rip Van Winkle was rather an over-dose, and during at least half
that time we could think of nothing better to do than sit around the
camp-fire on bearskins and talk. Ever since leaving Petropavlovsk,
talking had been our chief amusement; and although it had answered
very well for the first hundred nights or so, it was now becoming a
little monotonous and our mental resources were running decidedly low.
We could not think of a single subject about which we knew anything
that had not been talked over, criticised, and discussed to the very
bone. We had related to each other in detail the whole history of our
respective lives, together with the lives of all our ancestors as far
back as we knew anything about them. We had discussed in full every
known problem of Love, War, Science, Politics, and Religion, including
a great many that we knew nothing whatever about, and had finally been
reduced to such topics of conversation as the size of the army with
which Xerxes invaded Greece and the probable extent of the Noachian
deluge. As there was no possibility of arriving at any mutually
satisfactory conclusion with regard to either of these important
questions, the debate had been prolonged for twenty or thirty
consecutive nights and the questions finally left open for future
consideration. In cases of desperate emergency, when all other topics
of conversation failed, we knew that we could return to Xerxes and the
Flood; but these subjects had been dropped by the tacit consent of
both parties soon after leaving Gizhiga, and were held in reserve as a
"dernier ressort" for stormy nights in Korak _yurts_. One night as we
were encamped on a great steppe north of Shestakóva, the happy idea
occurred to me that I might pass away these long evenings out of
doors, by delivering a course of lectures to my native drivers upon
the wonders of modern science. It would amuse me and at the same time
instruct them--or at least I hoped it would, and I proceeded at
once to put the plan into execution. I turned my attention first to
astronomy. Camping out on the open steppe, with no roof above except
the starry sky, I had every facility for the illustration of my
subject, and night after night as we travelled northward I might have
been seen in the centre of a group of eager natives, whose swarthy
faces were lighted up by the red blaze of the camp-fire, and who
listened with childish curiosity while I explained the phenomena of
the seasons, the revolution of the planets around the sun, and the
causes of a lunar eclipse. I was compelled, like John Phoenix, to
manufacture my own orrery, and I did it with a lump of frozen, tallow
to represent the earth, a chunk of black bread for the moon, and small
pieces of dried meat for the lesser planets. The resemblance to the
heavenly bodies was not, I must confess, very striking; but by making
believe pretty hard we managed to get along. A spectator would have
been amused could he have seen with what grave solemnity I circulated
the bread and tallow in their respective orbits, and have heard the
long-drawn exclamations of astonishment from the natives as I brought
the bread into eclipse behind the lump of tallow. My first lecture
would have been a grand success if my native audience had only been
able to understand the representative and symbolical character of
the bread and tallow. The great trouble was that their imaginative
faculties were weak. They could not be made to see that bread stood
for the moon and tallow-for the earth, but persisted in regarding them
as so many terrestrial products having an intrinsic value of their
own. They accordingly melted up the earth to drink, devoured the
moon whole, and wanted another lecture immediately. I endeavoured
to explain to them that these lectures were intended to be
_as_tronomical, not _gas_tronomical, and that eating and drinking
up the heavenly bodies in this reckless way was very improper.
Astronomical science I assured them did not recognise any such
eclipses as those produced by swallowing the planets, and however
satisfactory such a course might be to them, it was very demoralising
to my orrery. Remonstrances had very little effect, and I was
compelled to provide a new sun, moon, and earth for every, lecture. It
soon became evident to me that these astronomical feasts were becoming
altogether too popular, for my audience thought nothing of eating up
a whole solar system every night, and planetary material was becoming
scarce. I was finally compelled, therefore, to use stones and
snowballs to represent celestial bodies, instead of bread and tallow,
and from that time the interest in astronomical phenomena gradually
abated and the popularity of my lectures steadily declined until I was
left without a single hearer.
The short winter day of three hours had long since closed and the
night was far advanced when after twenty-three days of rough travel
we drew near our final destination--the _ultima Thule_ of Russian
civilisation. I was lying on my sledge nearly buried in heavy furs and
half asleep, when the distant barking of dogs announced our approach
to the village of Anadyrsk. I made a hurried attempt to change my
thick fur _torbassa_ and overstockings for American boots, but was
surprised in the very act by the drawing up of my sledge before the
house of the Russian priest, where we intended to stop until we could
make arrangements for a house of our own.
A crowd of curious spectators had gathered about the door to see the
wonderful Amerikanse about whom they had heard, and prominent in the
centre of the fur-clad group stood the priest, with long flowing hair
and beard, dressed in a voluminous black robe, and holding above his
head a long tallow candle which flared wildly in the cold night air.
As soon as I could disencumber my feet of my overstockings I alighted
from my sledge, amid profound bows and "zdrastvuitias" from the crowd,
and received a hearty welcome from the patriarchal priest. Three weeks
roughing it in the wilderness had not, I fancy, improved my personal
appearance, and my costume would have excited a sensation anywhere
except in Siberia. My face, which was not over clean, was darkened by
three weeks' growth of beard; my hair was in confusion and hung in
long ragged locks over my forehead, and the fringe of shaggy black
bearskin around my face gave me a peculiarly wild and savage
expression of countenance. The American boots which I had hastily
drawn on as we entered the village were all that indicated any
previous acquaintance with civilisation. Replying to the respectful
salutations of the Chuances, Yukagirs, and Russian Cossacks who in
yellow fur hoods and potted deerskin coats crowded about the door, I
followed the priest into the house. It was the second dwelling worthy
the name of house which I had entered in twenty-two days, and after
the smoky Korak _yurts_ of Kuil, Mikina, and Shestakóva, it seemed
to me to be a perfect palace. The floor was carpeted with soft, dark
deerskins in which one's feet sank deeply at every step; a blazing
fire burned in a neat fireplace in one corner, and flooded the room
with cheerful light; the tables were covered with bright American
table-cloths; a tiny gilt taper was lighted before a massive gilt
shrine opposite the door; the windows were of glass instead of the
slabs of ice and the smoky fish bladders to which I had become
accustomed; a few illustrated newspapers lay on a stand in one corner,
and everything in the house was arranged with a taste and a view
to comfort which were as welcome to a tired traveller as they were
unexpected in this land of desolate steppes and uncivilised people.
Dodd, who was driving his own sledge, had not yet arrived; but from
the door we could hear a voice in the adjoining forest singing "Won't
I be glad when I get out of the wilderness, out o' the wilderness, out
o' the wilderness," the musician being entirely unconscious that he
was near the village, or that his melodiously expressed desire to "get
out o' the wilderness" was overheard by any one else. My Russian
was not extensive or accurate enough to enable me to converse very
satisfactorily with the priest, and I was heartily glad when Dodd
_got_ out of the wilderness, and appeared to relieve my embarrassment.
He didn't look much better than I did; that was one comfort. I drew
mental comparisons as soon as he entered the room and convinced myself
that one looked as much like a Korak as the other, and that neither
could claim precedence in point of civilisation on account of superior
elegance of dress. We shook hands with the priest's wife--a pale
slender lady with light hair and dark eyes,--made the acquaintance of
two or three pretty little children, who fled from us in affright as
soon as they were released, and finally seated ourselves at the table
to drink tea.
Our host's cordial manner soon put us at our ease, and in ten minutes
Dodd was rattling off fluently a highly coloured account of our
adventures and sufferings, laughing, joking, and drinking vodka with
the priest, as unceremoniously as if he had known him for ten years
instead of as many minutes. That was a peculiar gift of Dodd's, which
I often used to envy. In five minutes, with the assistance of a little
vodka, he would break down the ceremonious reserve of the severest
old patriarch in the whole Greek Church, and completely carry him by
storm; while I could only sit by and smile feebly, without being able
to say a word. Great is "the gift o' gab."
After an excellent supper of _shchi_ (shchee) or cabbage-soup, fried
cutlets, white bread and butter, we spread our bearskins down on the
floor, undressed ourselves for the second time in three weeks,
and went to bed. The sensation of sleeping without furs, and with
uncovered heads, was so strange, that for a long time we lay awake,
watching the red flickering firelight on the wall, and enjoying
the delicious warmth of soft, fleecy blankets, and the luxury of
unconfined limbs and bare feet.